This morning we were all supposed to head to Santa Barbara. Trish (RV-6A) does an annual new year's day flight with a group of pilots from Redlands, and they head up to SBA and eat at the Elephant Bar. This year would be no exception if it weren't for the weather. Despite it being pretty clear at Chino, most of the basin and coastline were socked in with an overcast layer around 5000'. Well, the forecast is calling for broken clouds, but we'll see how it goes. I don't mind flying up there and not getting in...figured it would be a good flight just to head up and scope it out, even if we had to divert. Yellowtail and I took off around 10:30 and climbed above the clouds.
With the Digitrak doing its thing, I was able to get some decent shots of Yellowtail.
A closeup, because why not?
Clouds to the north...
Clouds to the west...
It wasn't gonna happen, so we called it off not too far northwest of Van Nuys. At first I thought maybe Santa Monica would be a decent place for lunch, but despite it being VFR there, the overcast was gonna keep us from getting down in time to avoid the class B airspace.
We had been talking to Trish on frequency, and after hearing that we called off Santa Barbara, she came up with the idea of Lancaster. When it's overcast in LA, you can usually count on it being clear up in the desert.
We diverted over toward Fox field. John got a few good air-to-air shots of me as well.
I slipped it over toward him to get banked in for the shot.
No paint works out to be pretty good contrast against the clouds.
I get a kick out of seeing photos of me flying. Trippy.
Up close and personal.
We spread out for a few minutes to have a little fun.
Ok, you get the point. There were clouds.
After lunch, John and I did some in-trail work. I'll leave the details to your imagination. Let's just say it inspired me to build this contraption.
What is it, you ask?
Well, there you go. It's a mount for my mini DV video camera.
The cool thing is that the screen rotates and flips back, so I can "monitor" what it's recording.
Even though the mount doesn't interfere with the passenger seat, this is only gonna be in the plane for SOLO ops. Four bolts and it's out. I've ordered some 10-32 stainless wing nuts and knurled thumb screws from McMaster so I won't need any tools to get it in and out quickly.
You can kind of see the green stuff between the camera and the mount. That's your run of the mill toolbox liner foam rubber stuff. That gets sandwiched in between, and the camera is fastened to the mount using the 1/4-20 screw that threads right into the female tripod mount. I spent quite a while measuring and determining ideal angles for the optimal view. It's located as close to the center as possible without interfering with the canopy latch. It's located as aft as possible while still letting the canopy open and close without contacting, and it's located as high as possible without hitting the canopy and still allowing me to get my fingers over the top for zoom, focus, etc. It's angled slightly down so as to include a bit of the cowl in the view.
I finished this thing around 9:30pm, but I just had to give it a try. Wanna see the first video? This camera doesn't deal well with low light, but hey, I had to try it. I've learned that I need to manually focus the camera on infinity for the best performance in low light. Will do some cool daytime in-trail videos soon...
FYI, on January 2 I went up and took a video of some aerobatics and fun stuff. I'm editing it down, but it came out AWESOME. This is gonna be so friggin' cool. What a way to kick off the new year!